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Well a leader in astronomy years ago was able to see the canals on Mars and mapped them.
Like so many things it turned out he was very wrong but at the time people believed him and he was convinced he was right.
Alex

And since we're talking about resolution, it's worth pointing out that light is in the THz EM range while radio is in the MHz range, meaning radio waves are on the order of a billion times longer than light waves.

And since we're talking about resolution, it's worth pointing out that light is in the THz EM range while radio is in the MHz range, meaning radio waves are on the order of a billion times longer than light waves.

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Thank you I am familiar with wavelength I just did not know that the Arecibo works on radio frequency

I worked in a chemical lab with spectrophotometers X- ray, UV , Visible , IR. and Raman in chemical analysis .
So what is a radio scope, Radio frequency is Am Fm. bands.

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I said a radio 'scope, short hand for radio telescope, hence my use of the 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory
We also have Infrared 'scopes, gamma ray 'scopes, [Fermi] X-Ray 'scopes [Chandra] and even Ultra Violet, covering the whole range of the EMS.

Also, Arecibo can't be pointed at Mars, unless Mars deigns to wander across its path. Escept for a very limited arc accomplished by moving its collector array, it can't be pointed at all.

And I don't think Mars has any radio signature at all even if we could look at it.

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Good point.
And of course for the benefit of timijon, we do have other radio telescopes that are fully steerable through 360 degrees and also large vertical tilt such as the Parkes Radio telescope in NSW Australia, and just a hop, skip and a jump from Sydney where I live [well around 350kms!

It's capabilities can also be greatly extended, when operated in conjunction with the ATCA [Australia Telescope Compact Array] at Narrabri [380kms north of Parkes] to form what we call a "Very Long Baseline Interferometry Array"
It is commonly known as "the dish" and was the first telescope to receive live TV images from Apollo 11.

The Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES).Credit: NASA/JPL
Mars is a rocky planet with an ancient volcanic past, but new findings show the planet is more complex and active than previously believed – at least in certain places.

Finding those places, however, turns out to be trickier than just looking at landforms like river valleys or lakebeds or searching for specific minerals.

"Context is everything," said Philip Christensen, Principal Investigator for the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) on Mars Global Surveyor and for the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on Mars Odyssey, as well as lead scientist for the Mini-TES instruments on the Mars Exploration Rovers. "There has been a lot of excitement about finding specific features or minerals, but THEMIS, together with the TES infrared spectrometer, is giving us an overview by finding all the minerals. It gives us context – the underlying geology of the place."

A paper led by Christensen, to be released online by the journal Nature on July 6, describes how a detailed examination of the Red Planet’s surface minerals using THEMIS and TES data yields surprising results in certain localized areas.

While the current rover missions have largely proved that in the distant past Mars may have had a lake or two, several different orbital mapping missions have found a basalt-rich planet that is the product of an ancient volcanic history. Geologically, it seems like a simple planet in the large scale – but then there are local windows showing far more complexity.

"From what we have seen to date, you might imagine going to Mars and seeing nothing but basalt," said Christensen. "The evidence has always shown that the planet was active early, made some big volcanoes and then shut down and that was that. But when we looked more carefully we saw that there are these other places…When you look at the geology in the right spots, there is as much diversity in the rocks as you see on Earth.

"Once you get a glimpse of this complexity, you realize that there is a very complex world underneath that veneer of basalt."

What Christensen and team found were localized deposits showing a distribution of igneous mineral types rivaling the range of minerals found on Earth – from primitive volcanic rocks like olivine-rich basalts to highly processed silica-rich rocks like granites.